


The Last Hour

by disenchanted



Category: 15th Century CE RPF, Henry IV Part 1 - Shakespeare, Henry IV Part 2 - Shakespeare
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Brother/Sister Incest, Catholics rules-lawyering virginity, Consent Issues, Dysfunctional Family, F/M, Power Play, Roman Catholicism, Trauma, V.C. Andrews energy, implied father/son incest
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-04
Updated: 2020-03-04
Packaged: 2021-02-28 17:53:29
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,509
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23011285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/disenchanted/pseuds/disenchanted
Summary: Hal and Philippa spend a night together.
Relationships: Prince Hal/Henry IV (implied), Prince Hal/Philippa of Lancaster
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	The Last Hour

**Author's Note:**

> This is a sort of continuation of my [modern Henry/Hal series](https://archiveofourown.org/series/698174), though it's not canon for that verse and can be read as a standalone.

Philippa and Hal were the only ones who spent nights in the townhouse. During the day the siblings worked in shifts to ensure that Henry was never alone: they visited in pairs, and each pair did a three-hour shift, which between the six of them covered the hospital’s visiting hours. They met up for dinner two or three times a week, but otherwise disappeared into their different Londons. On the first night, Philippa had asked if she could sleep on the sofa at Hal’s flat, and Hal told her she could just take the keys to the flat and he’d sleep at the townhouse, and she said she would sleep at the townhouse if he was going to; so Blanche took the flat (‘I hope it’s not gross, Hal’) since she was still living in accommodation at Exeter and had nowhere else in London to go.  
  
Hal knew, when Philippa insisted she stay with him, that it would happen again, but he didn’t know when and he didn’t try to anticipate it. He woke up in the mornings and dreaded going to the hospital and then went to the hospital and came back and lay exhausted in his unmade bed, watching BBC talking heads argue about Brexit on the little TV that he used to use to watch gay movies in secret (not porn, actually cinema, though his father wouldn’t have made the distinction). Mostly he was alone: whatever time Philippa didn’t spend at the hospital she spent at her old London studio, practising, making sure she wouldn’t be behind when she got back to her ballet school in New York.  
  
One day, after he stayed up most of the night and then took the 8-11 am shift with John, Hal came home from the hospital and slept for another hour, and woke to Philippa knocking on his door. Without getting up he said, ‘Come in.’  
  
He expected her to tell him John was trying to make plans for dinner or Henry wanted them to bring something in for him. She came in and flung herself down on the bed next to him, and got under the covers and rolled onto her side so she could look at him carefully. It was still light outside; she had come back from the studio very early. Her hair was damp from the shower, and the chemical fragrance of her shampoo was strong. Her expression was guarded, but her knobbly bandaged feet touched his shins.  
  
‘Why are you home?’ Hal asked.  
  
‘Why, should I not be? It’s my house too. Not any less than it is yours.’  
  
‘No,’ he said, ‘I’m glad you’re here.’  
  
‘I’m going to make fish for lunch,’ she said. ‘I wanted to tell you so you wouldn’t be cross if you woke up later and missed it. That’s all.’  
  
She sat up and swung her legs off of the bed, then looked back at Hal. She was thinking about it, but she was hesitating, like you do when you’re going to jump from a diving board or leap over a gap, knowing that what you do next is going to have consequences.  
  
‘I’ll get up,’ Hal said, not getting up.  
  
Philippa said, ‘Fine, then,’ and left. When Hal came downstairs ten minutes later, he found her standing at the stove watching over two slim fillets of salmon on a skillet and spinach boiling in a saucepan. He pushed her voluminous yellow hair over one shoulder and leant down to kiss the back of her bare neck, letting his lips bend the soft transparent hairs there. She said, ‘Leave me alone, the spinach has only got thirty seconds left.’  
  
They ate together, in companionable silence, at the kitchen table. Philippa took ages; after finishing his own plate, Hal rested his forearms on the table and watched her scraping flakes of salmon onto tines of her fork, bringing the fork to her mouth and nibbling modestly. Afterwards he washed the plates in the sink and she came up behind him, putting her hand on his hip and resting her forehead against the broad shifting surface of his back.  
  
‘Leave me alone,’ he said, exaggeratedly petulant, ‘I’m washing dishes.’  
  
‘Liudmila is coming tomorrow,’ she said, ‘just leave them in the sink and she’ll take care of them.’  
  
‘Oh, yes, leave it all for Liudmila, I’m sure she’d be happy to hear you say that.’  
  
‘It’s only two dishes, I don’t know how much trouble it could possibly be.’  
  
‘Then let me do it. The only other thing I’ve done today is read to our father from his prayer-book.’  
  
When Hal turned round, Philippa blocked him in: she put her hands on the counter on either side of him and stood on tiptoes to look him in the eyes, like an esteemed enemy, before kissing him. That was how it went with Philippa. He put his arms around her, holding her up. She tasted like his mouth, but better; probably all he tasted like to her was cigarettes. When was the last time they had kissed? He thought maybe after the last time they had slept together, which was sometime in the first few days of January 2017, a year and three months ago. Philippa was seventeen and Hal was twenty-five and everyone was talking about whether Britain would trigger Article 50. It seemed like a very long time had passed since then, and also like absolutely nothing had happened. He felt like he had been killing time waiting to be here again, touching Philippa’s hair, opening his mouth so that she could put her tongue into it.  
  
To signal that this was not all she wanted, she slipped a hand beneath Hal’s jumper and t-shirt, rubbing her fingertips over his bare side. She said, ‘Have you noticed you’ve gained weight?’  
  
He said, ‘I try not to notice what happens to my body, generally.’  
  
‘Are you noticing now?’ she asked.  
  
‘Yes, I said generally, I didn’t say now.’  
  
She slid her hand round Hal’s back and down beneath the waistband of his chinos, feeling his arse. He accepted this as curious exploration, like when they were little and she picked his nose for him or prodded inside his ear. He was tolerant, too, when she nosed down his neck and licked it and then bit the skin she’d licked, sucking at it with obviously malignant intent. The first time, she’d left him with an enormous maroon hickey that he’d had to cover with her makeup, which was just a shade too light for his skin. He turned his head to try to get her to stop, but she sunk her teeth in and held on.  
  
‘Don’t do that,’ he said, ‘if you leave a mark Dad’s going to ask about it, and I’ll have to say it’s from some rando, and then he’ll be angry with me, and I don’t want to have a row with him while he’s in hospital.’  
  
Philippa let Hal’s skin out of her teeth but kept her mouth against his neck. Having groped his arse sufficiently, she touched his prick instead, feeling it through his trousers. He was hard, and he knew she’d known that, but it was humiliating to have her acknowledge it: he felt like he’d failed her somehow.  
  
‘Don’t do that either,’ he said, and moved her hand away.  
  
Pulling back to look at him, she said, ‘Why not?’  
  
‘Because I told you so,’ he said.  
  
‘I don’t have to do what you tell me to do.’  
  
‘Yes you do. I’m in charge here, you’re my guest.’  
  
‘I am not! If anything I should be the one in charge. You’ve got a flat, that’s what you’re in charge of. I never really moved out, I’m just away for a bit. So really I have more claim to this house than you do.’  
  
‘If our father was dead right now,’ Hal said, ‘this house would belong to me.’  
  
‘But it doesn’t happen just like that, you’ve got to legally inherit first.’  
  
Her skin was translucent from a winter spent indoors, and the red of her flush showed through brightly. He’d only argued the point because he knew it would incense her; he couldn’t help but want to torment her a little, even as he desired her. She reached for his prick again and he caught her wrist in his hand; she tried with her other hand and he caught it too, and yanked her arms up so that her hands were well above his waist.  
  
He had the advantage of height and weight, but she was stronger than him, more athletic and more agile. She broke out of his grasp and he fumbled to keep her at bay, and they slapped and tugged at each other like ill-behaved children. Finally he got her up against the pantry door, and instead of trying to pin her down he kept her in place by kissing her deeply.  
  
‘I just mean,’ she said, her mouth a little reddened, ‘that if we’re going to do this at all I don’t see why we would bother with picking and choosing what we should and shouldn’t do.’  
  
‘Because it matters,’ Hal said.  
  
‘You’re so patronising.’  
  
‘No, I just know better than you.’ At her furious look he laughed and said, ‘You are so easy to fuck with. It’s so funny.’  
  
Because he needed to placate her somehow, he put his hand between her thighs, pressing his palm against the radiating warmth of her cunt. She was wearing jeans, and she must not have felt anything through the denim but faint pressure; she responded anyway, leaning back against the door, jutting her hips up against his hand, letting out a short huff of frustration. He kissed her brow, which did nothing to stop her frowning.  
  
‘Just touch me, then,’ she said, ‘if that’s what you want.’  
  
Hal hated talking about what he wanted. It was such a great responsibility to want things from someone you loved. If Philippa could have trained him so that he did nothing but anticipate and fulfill her desires, he would have been happy. But he wasn’t going to ask her what she wanted now; he thought the best thing he could do was to absolve her of the responsibility.  
  
Guessing, then, at what would please her, he unbuttoned her jeans and put his hand down the front of them, touching the folds of her cunt through her flower-print cotton knickers. He could tell by touch that there was no hair on her cunt; he wondered how much it had hurt to get rid of, whether she had nicked herself shaving or grimaced through a compassionless wax. He was under no illusions that she’d done it for him — she had actually told him this before, explaining that you sort of had to do it if you were going to spend a lot of time wearing a leotard and opening your legs for an audience — but it made things easier: there was no layer of hair between his fingers and her cunt, she couldn’t help but feel it. Even then he was too gentle for her: she clutched his wrist to try to keep his hand in place, press it harder against her.  
  
Stilling his fingers he said, ‘Hands at your side.’  
  
‘Why?’ she asked.  
  
‘So I can touch you, like you literally just told me to.’  
  
Once she had complied he rewarded her by rubbing her clit hard enough to make her strain against him. She breathed hard; she flung her head back, looking up at him with unpretending arousal. The harder she strained, the more gently Hal touched her, till she learned that if she wanted him to do anything that would actually afford her pleasure she would have to stay still and let him do it. When he was certain he was in control he began to tease her again: he’d stroke her clit until she moaned and then stop, and dip his fingers down to feel the damp spot on her knickers.  
  
He knew she was close when she started making those stopped-up, struggling noises. She wasn’t putting on a face for him, she was letting him see what she felt. Her mouth was open; he saw her teeth and tongue. He brought her so close to orgasm that when he stopped touching her he wasn’t sure if she had actually started coming or not. Her hips jerked in a way that didn’t seem entirely under her control. The back of her head knocked against the pantry door. She glowered like she did when he told her to do something, some chore or little favour, she resented being asked to do.  
  
‘Don’t give me that look,’ Hal said. ‘You like it really.’  
  
‘Do you say “You like it really” to every girl you sleep with? What a disgusting thing to say.’  
  
‘But they like it really. Probably not all girls would, but the ones who sleep with me do.’  
  
To prove his point, he put his hand down her knickers and felt out the crease of her cunt, dipping his fingertips in just enough to wet them. He touched her clit, then, as gently as he possibly could, distracting himself from his own untouched prick by torturing her with almost-satisfaction.  
  
‘Did you come before?’ he asked. ‘Just now, I mean?’  
  
‘No,’ she said. ‘You couldn’t tell I didn’t?’  
  
‘Yeah, I don’t know, it could have been a really disappointing orgasm?’  
  
‘I would have just said, “That was really disappointing.”’  
  
‘Noted,’ Hal said, and took her right to the edge again, and stopped when she told him she was about to come. He waited until her breathing evened out, then grazed his fingers over her clit to get one last twitch out of her before he buttoned up her jeans and kissed her forehead.  
  
Philippa had the last laugh: when Hal went back up to his bedroom he caught his reflection in the mirror on the wall over his chest of drawers and saw there was a bruise on his neck that showed the unmistakable imprint of teeth.  
  


* * *

  
Before bed Hal took a long shower, standing under the spray and looking at the runoff coursing around his feet. When they were children and lived together here, the siblings had always fought each other fiercely over their occupancy of this one shared bathroom. As the eldest, Hal could pull rank and demand to bathe first, but if he didn’t leave enough hot water, whoever had been forced to take a cold shower would find some way to exact revenge, so he’d got used to jumping in and scrubbing himself down and jumping out in five minutes or less, which stood him in good stead when he went off to school. Now he ran the hot water out just because he could. Then he shaved his face and cleaned his teeth and swabbed his ears and popped a ripe pimple he noticed on his forehead. Looking at himself shirtless in the mirror, he thought that Philippa was right, he had gained weight since she had seen him last. The waistband of his Primark boxer-briefs was pinching into the soft flesh on his hips.  
  
When he returned to his bedroom, Philippa was sitting in his bed, on top of the covers, in a flimsy eyelet lace bralette and the same knickers she’d been wearing earlier, looking at her phone. She scrolled for a few seconds longer before looking up. Here, in the room that hadn’t changed since Hal was eighteen, surrounded by the leftovers of his adolescence—stacks of vinyl records he’d picked up at charity shops, empty bottles of brand-name liquor displayed proudly on his shelves—she seemed not to belong. Except for her bruised and blistered feet she looked like an idealised painting of a beautiful young woman, a Pre-Raphaelite nude with long limbs and long hair and small breasts and small hips. By the dim light of the lamp on the bedside table, her skin looked flawlessly smooth and hairless, like she was actually made of oil paint.  
  
Hal had seen her close enough before to know that she was a mammal just like any other human, that there were tiny transparent hairs covering all of her skin except the parts she had chosen to depilate. He was aware that Philippa’s body looked like what most men thought girls’ bodies ought to look like naturally; that if any eighteen-year-old girl didn’t look like she did, you could assume that either her genetics were so bad she could basically be written off as a human being, or she had the potential but was too stupid or selfish or lesbian to make herself look good. But Philippa only looked like that because her purpose in life was to achieve control over her body: when she was at school, she woke up at five in the morning and went to bed at ten at night, and spent the intervening hours exerting her indomitable will against herself.

‘Are you going to sleep here?’ he asked.  
  
‘If I feel like it,’ she said.  
  
She put her phone face-down on his bedside table and watched him as he came to her. They kissed; she ran her fingers through his towel-dried hair, then touched his bare chest, and groped his arse again, and let his thigh slot between hers so that she could grind against him. He thought he could actually feel the blood draining out of his skull and coursing down into his prick, filling it out, heartbeat by heartbeat, until the pressure hurt.  
  
Their legs tangled and untangled, and then she was on top of him, riding his clothed prick. She leant over him and planted her hands on his chest; her hair fell in his face, tickling him, getting in his mouth. Worrying that touching her arse or her breasts would be too much, he put his hands on her waist. He hadn’t got off after lunch, just waited until his prick went down, and now it felt like he was twice as hard, which made him twice as ashamed of himself. He shut his eyes and tried not to think about what it might feel like to fuck her, and accomplished this fairly successfully until she said, ‘I wish you would fuck me.’  
  
‘Well I’m not going to.’  
  
‘Would you if I wasn’t a virgin?’  
  
‘It doesn’t matter, because you are.’  
  
‘You don’t know that,’ she said, sitting up so that she could look haughtily down at him. She was moving more slowly now, but she was still rolling her hips, rubbing her cunt down against the stiff line of his prick. ‘You don’t know anything about what I do when you’re not there. I could be getting fucked every day of my life and you wouldn’t know.’  
  
‘Remember that time when you stole one of Dad’s good bottles of whiskey, and everybody blamed me for it, and I was the only one who could tell it was you? Or when you borrowed Tom’s car and dented it and said the dent had always been there, and I said you had obviously done it and you screamed at me in front of everyone about how I was falsely accusing you, and then that Christmas you got drunk and told me you did it? I’ve never believed a single lie you’ve ever told. I know you. You would hate yourself for not having the self-discipline to keep from committing a mortal sin.’  
  
‘But I don’t think it matters the way you do. I’m not saving myself for my husband, I just wanted to wait until I really wanted it, and I do. I haven’t even got a hymen anymore, it’s been gone for ages. Nobody would ever have to know.’  
  
‘God would know.’  
  
Philippa snorted. ‘Like God knows every time you get fucked in the arse. Like God knows what our father’s done to you.’  
  
‘Well, quite.’  
  
‘Will you fuck me with your fingers? Will you fuck me in the arse, would that be better? Or do you only take it?’  
  
‘No, no, absolutely not, and if you don’t stop asking I’ll lock you out of my room and never touch you again. And you don’t really want it, it just makes you randy to shock me by asking.’  
  
He could feel, even through two layers of fabric, that her knickers were wet enough to make the cotton slick. He was wet too: there was a dark spot of precome where the head of his prick was outlined in his pants. Sensation was blunted enough that though he was so hard his balls ached, he was nowhere close to coming; he missed what he had been like when he was younger, when he would come from thirty seconds of being touched. He hated this feeling of being trapped at the midpoint between chastity and release: it felt filthier than actually coming.  
  
Philippa had slipped a hand into her knickers and was massaging the spot just above her clit. Her face and neck were deep pink, and her brow was furrowed, and she whimpered close-mouthed as she worked herself. She seemed like she was trying to make herself come, and because Hal couldn’t stand to be hard after she had been satisfied, he pushed her off of him and got her on her back, her feet near his pillows and her head near the foot of the bed, her hair falling over the edge. He lowered himself down and pressed his face into her cunt, and mouthed at her clit through the fabric, stimulating her without quite satisfying, until she started pulling his hair so hard that he thought she might rip it out.  
  
‘For fuck’s sake, that hurts,’ he complained, drawing back, rubbing at his sore scalp.  
  
‘Well it hurts that you won’t just do what I want.’  
  
‘Yes, but you’re just going to have to put up with it, and be happy with what you get.’  
  
Having said that, he hooked his fingers on the waistband of her knickers and pulled them off slowly. The skin around her cunt, he saw, was the same pink as her face, blooming outwards from the redder centre. She lay still and watched him as he took his own pants off; she stared at his hard red prick without shame, and spread her legs so that he could get between them, bringing his prick just barely up against her cunt. She held her breath and shut her eyes.  
  
Hal felt strongly then that he didn’t really want to fuck her. He wanted to touch her, to have her, to make her come; but not to ruin her. He took his shaft in his hand and rubbed the wet head of his prick against her clit, making her whine and bite her lip and squirm against him, trying to nudge his prick downwards and into her, so insistent that he put his other hand on her stomach to keep her still. He let the head of his prick rest just between the inner lips of her cunt, pressing up against the underside of her clit. If she wanted she could angle her hips down and force him into her, and fuck herself on him, and take what she wanted and leave him to deal with the guilt. He held his breath and waited for her to do it and found that she didn’t; her chest rose and fell, but she kept herself otherwise still.  
  
He was closer than he’d realised to coming. He tugged at his shaft and felt his balls tighten, and thought, Oh God, what am I doing? Philippa was gasping, splitting her thighs wide and drawing them up to bare her cunt for him; she cried out more loudly than him when he finished. His come collected on her lower stomach, thick and opaque white. He watched her lovely pink face, her hazy pleased look, and sustained himself with it as the shame took hold of him.  
  
He drew back from her and wiped his softening prick off with a fistful of bedsheet. His whole body felt heavy with guilt; he wanted a cigarette and some whiskey. When he turned back to Philippa he saw she had closed her eyes and was touching herself, sliding her fingers through his come, using it to smooth the way as she stroked her clit.  
  
His body had been satisfied, but he still wanted her. He was incoherent with bewildered desire. He could resist or he could succumb, and he chose the latter, thinking that afterwards he would be sorry enough to ask God for forgiveness and be granted it. He got down on his stomach between her legs and licked his own come off of her stomach, suffering through the foul taste. Then he licked her cunt, and she moaned and pet his hair and lifted her hips, saying, ‘Yes, oh, Hal, Hal, don’t stop, don’t stop—’  
  
Then she went quiet, which meant she was concentrating on trying to come. When he stopped and sat up she gave a sharp yelp of supreme disgust. She said, ‘Are you ever going to let me come? Or do you think it’s wrong?’  
  
‘Not so wrong that I wouldn’t do it.’  
  
‘Then do it,’ she demanded.  
  
For this part he sat up against his pillows and situated her in his lap, her back against his chest, her hips cradled between his spread thighs. He swept her hair over her left shoulder and bent down to kiss just beneath her right ear, and grazed his hand up her thigh to her cunt, teasing at her swollen inner lips. With his other hand he reached round and pulled her bra up to expose her breasts. He could feel her clit twitch when he touched her nipples, and for a while played with her like that, cupping her breasts, pinching her nipples, feeling her cunt pulsing in response. He did it long enough to settle her into a state of heavy, lethargic arousal, the sort of pleasure that was an end in and of itself. He thought of how small and neat and clean her body felt against his, which more than ever seemed hideous and huge. He was always ducking his head to pass through low doorways, or asking H&M employees whether they had any trousers in 34x36 and being told to try a Big & Tall shop. Philippa complained about being too tall for a dancer, but he had never not been able to see the top of her head; she was his little sister, the baby of the family, who could be teased and tormented but never truly hurt.  
  
Overwhelmed with love for her, he kissed her neck and stroked her clit, hard enough to encourage her to try to come again and gentle enough that there was no numbing roughness, she would have to feel it fully. Her hips undulated, her thighs fluttered inwards and outwards; she cried out unselfconsciously, saying nothing, knowing that Hal would know what she meant. Then her hips and thighs went taut: she flung her head back against his shoulder, she bit her lip and let a moan swell and strengthen in the back of her throat until it was too large to hold there and she opened her mouth and let it out.  
  
A second later she cried out again, because she was coming; her thighs were trembling, her clit was twitching beneath Hal’s fingertips. Hal kept waiting for her to soften and go quiet, and she didn’t: for fully a minute she was shuddering against him, seeming somehow not to be herself. When she finally settled down again she said, ‘Hal,’ just to acknowledge that he was there.  
  
If he were really kind to her he would have helped her wash and sent her to bed. Instead he helped her pull her bra off, then pulled his hands along her stomach and thighs and waited for her breath to slow. He let his hand creep towards her cunt so subtly that even he wasn’t sure when he had gone from not touching her to touching her. She made a funny little noise and closed her thighs to keep his hand locked between them. He was getting hard again, he realised, and resigned himself to it.  
  
‘I can’t believe,’ she said, ‘that we’re going to have to stop doing this.’  
  
‘You mean stop tonight, or stop forever?’  
  
‘I think either would be just as bad.’  
  
‘You’ll get sore and bored eventually. I had sex all night once, because I was on crystal meth, and it felt good at the time, but I felt like I was dying for a week afterwards.’  
  
He expected that she would laugh at him, and realised it aroused her: her nipples were hardening, her strong slim thighs flexing. She opened her legs, and as he swept his fingertips up and down her inner lips she made noises to encourage him.  
  
‘What do you mean had sex?’ she asked, a little breathless.  
  
‘Like what I actually did? I don’t know.’ He was touching her properly now, pulling the hood of her clit back to rub at the sensitive hard little swell beneath. Philippa was tensed-still, trembling, just at the cusp of overstimulation. ‘It was a long time ago and I did lots of things. I got fucked in the arse, if that’s what you’re asking. I sucked dick, I got my dick sucked… All of the usual sins against nature.’  
  
‘And then you were sorry after?’  
  
‘Yes,’ Hal said.  
  
‘And you confessed? And did penance? And were absolved?’  
  
‘Yes,’ Hal said.  
  
‘And then you did it all again anyway?’  
  
‘Yes,’ Hal said.  
  
Philippa was heaving, breathing hard. She was close to finishing again, and Hal was obliging her, bringing her steadily towards it. Her back was arched, the soles of her feet pressed against his shins; she took his other hand and brought it up to her breast, which he complaisantly cupped, rubbing his thumb over her nipple.

He thought she had forgotten what they were talking about, and then she said, ‘That’s so funny. You’re just like our father.’  
  
Hal took his fingers off Philippa’s clit just at the moment she started to come. She cried out louder than the last time, but it was thwarted and miserable; she shook in a way that seemed visibly frustrated. Once he was sure it would not gratify her, he cupped her cunt and felt against his fingertips the last faint pulses of orgasm.  
  
‘I shouldn’t have said that,’ she said. ‘But I’m very sorry, and I promise I won’t ever do it again.’  
  
‘Save it for confession.’  
  
Leaning back against him, melting into the cradle of his body, she said, ’I don’t go to Mass anymore. I only went at Christmas because Dad made us all go; I’ve never gone to Mass once in New York. I’ve been on birth control for a year. As soon as I got back to America the last time I went to the doctor for it.’  
  
‘Philippa,’ Hal said. It hurt: it was stupid of him, it wasn’t his sin, but he was sorry for it anyway, and sorry he had been the reason for it. He had always thought—even when he was making her come, letting her make him come—that she was the one who had a chance to be good, to make up for what her father and brother had done. But she shared their blood, she was just like them: there was nothing they could do to make themselves love God more than they loved themselves.  
  
‘You can disapprove of me as much as you like,’ she said, ‘but please don’t tell Dad.’  
  
‘No, I won’t. I promise.’  
  
‘Like you promise you’re really, really, really never going to sin again.’  
  
‘Oh, but I never promise that, I just firmly resolve. It’s different.’  
  
‘You’ve broken promises before, though. You’ve broken promises to me before. You’ve never had any conscience at all about it. You’ll say anything, and do whatever you like.’  
  
‘Then don’t believe me. But I mean it. You’ve kept my secrets, I’ll keep yours.’  
  
Philippa turned around and kissed him so thoroughly that he didn’t notice how their bodies were moving. Her mouth was hot and wet, and her kissing as filthy as any drugged-up older man who fucked Hal bareback. It was only when their mouths broke apart that he realised Philippa had slipped into his lap. Her thighs were split over his hips, her shins resting on the mattress; her hands were on his shoulders, close to his neck. His prick was trapped between his stomach and her cunt, the underside of his shaft resting along the line of her lips. She was grinding down softly, pleasing herself, teasing him, with the friction of her clit against his the hard curve of his prick.  
  
‘Please,’ she said. Their faces were inches apart; her breath touched his skin as she spoke. He could see his own silhouette reflected in the wide, deep black of her pupils.  
  
‘No,’ Hal said.  
  
‘Hal, please.’  
  
‘I said no.’  
  
‘But you want to,’ she said.  
  
‘I don’t know what I want.’  
  
‘That’s not true. You know exactly what you want, you always have. It’s just that you don’t think of the things you want as things you want; you just think of them as things that are going to happen, like you weren’t the one who made them happen.’  
  
She had lifted herself up just enough so that she could get the head of his prick lined up against the entrance of her cunt, parting her inner lips. He thought of being in a theatre and watching the heavy red curtains beginning to open: first he was in the audience and the stage was revealed, then he was on the stage and the audience was revealed. Holding herself up, she was unnaturally steady and still. Hal had had girls lower themselves down onto his prick like this before, and usually their thighs trembled. The slight physical exertion seemed in itself to give Philippa pleasure. Her brow was smooth, her jaw slack, her mouth open. Keeping Hal’s gaze, she touched the place where their bodies just barely met.  
  
The awful thing was that he really didn’t know what he wanted. His body wanted to pull her down onto his prick and come inside of her; but he had enough foresight now, at the advanced age of twenty-six, to know that if he did he really would be sorry afterwards, and would wish he had not done it. Their father worried about his soul, but to Hal it was inescapably active, like a second self within himself, like a child waiting to be born.  
  
‘Philippa, stop,’ he said.  
  
‘Would you want it if you thought I might have a baby?’  
  
Would he? His prick twitched against her cunt, letting out a little precome. He wished he wasn’t thinking about it. He wished he and Philippa could have been like their mother and father were, flesh of each other’s flesh. What was it like to share in someone else’s body and know that it was good, and that they would not be punished for it but rewarded?  
  
Having quite ruined himself, Hal didn’t think he would ever know. He said, ‘You can think whatever makes you come harder.’  
  
‘But I want to know the truth.’  
  
Hal kissed her sweetly. He put his hand over hers and moved it away, and touched her cunt himself, wetting his fingers with it, slicking her fluid down his prick the way he’d seen men do with Astroglide or Swiss Navy before they fucked him. He looked at her face as he took hold of the base of his prick and let the head press against her arsehole; for a second he was his father looking at himself. This is different, he thought, because Philippa actually wants it. Then he thought: well, that was what Henry thought about me.  
  
‘Oh my God,’ she said, laughing, ‘I can’t believe you’re actually doing it.’  
  
‘I never mean it when I say no. I thought you’d have known that about me by now. You might reach round the back and help it in yourself; that’s what I do.’  
  
Reaching behind herself and holding onto Hal’s prick as she tried to sink down on it, she said, ‘Tell me about the first time you did this.’  
  
‘This is the first time I’m doing this.’  
  
‘Don’t be cheeky, you know what I mean. Were you older or younger than I am?’  
  
‘Younger,’ Hal said, letting her fuck herself on the head of his prick, trying to get it inside her entirely. ‘Not by much, I was sixteen. It was an older man who lived in town near school. He was the first person I found on the “men seeking men” section of a personals website. I had to email him from one of the school computers, we didn’t have mobiles with the internet then. I told him where I went to school and he asked me for a picture and I said I couldn’t send one because I was on a school computer. I’m amazed he gave me his address; if I were him I would have assumed it was a sting operation. It was sort of flattering that he wanted to fuck me so badly he would risk it. Anyway I cycled over—he had a little maisonette, I think he said he owned it—and he offered me tea and tried to ask me how my day was, and I told him that he should just fuck me. So he sucked my dick for like two seconds, and I came, and he laughed at me, and then he fingered me and was like, oh I love when boys don’t clean their arseholes before they get fucked, and then I was like, oh was I supposed to be doing that? I wouldn’t know, it’s my first time, but I suppose it’s good you like it.

‘And then he fucked me and I was surprised at how much it didn’t hurt. Then afterwards we smoked a joint together and I got really, really high and had to cycle back to school thinking about how weird my arsehole felt and wondering if it was going to be like that forever. Then everything was normal again and I had to go on like it didn’t happen, except that I went to confession the next Saturday night, before Mass, and the priest was so sad about it, and just banged on about how much God loves His children, and how much He suffers… It was Lent, so Dad was literally sending me postcards reminding me to go to confession.’  
  
It was Lent now, and the last time he went to Mass was before Henry was admitted to hospital, and the last time he went to confession was weeks before that, because it had been weeks since he’d committed a mortal sin. He would have to go again before Holy Week, he thought. He leant forward and kissed the soft skin between Philippa’s breasts; he put his thumb over her clit and stroked it until he could feel her dripping against his prick. Could sex ever be all that holy, he wondered, if it was something that you had to have a body to do? They were no less pure than any other sinners. But Philippa was so much less grotesque than Hal was: her face was beautiful, her voice was beautiful, her cunt and arsehole were beautiful, her hair was beautiful, her ears and collarbone and ribs and teeth.  
  
‘And when was the next time you did it?’ Philippa was fighting to speak clearly; her cheeks were so red she looked fevered, and she was making a little overwhelmed noise every time his prick moved in her. He wasn’t entirely inside of her yet, but it didn’t matter; he felt it more intensely than he’d felt anything in a while.  
  
‘After Easter that same year,’ he said. He worked her clit as he fucked her arse; she tried to get him to hurry it up, but she was going to come soon enough, and he brought her towards it steadily. ‘I would have done it earlier if I’d had the chance, but it was difficult to run off without anyone asking where you were going, and they only got more curious when you wouldn’t say. The first man emailed me like three times after that, but I never responded. I found another one, a bit younger but way more working class. The first one insisted on wearing a condom, the second one just shrugged and said okay when I asked him to do bareback. He had this picture above his bed that I remember really clearly. And then I kept asking him to fuck me harder and then he did, until it really hurt.’  
  
Philippa wasn’t saying anything anymore. She kept closing her eyes and then struggling to open them again. Her fingernails were digging into Hal’s shoulders. He was jealous of her incoherence, even remembering that when he had been made incoherent he’d felt like there wasn’t anything left in the world for him.  
  
Recognising that he could speak to her now without retort, he said, ‘You don’t really want to be like me. I know you think you do, but you don’t, and I know you think I can’t tell you what you want, but I can. I have to be like our father, that’s my lot in life. You can do anything else in the world. You’re going to remember me telling you this, and if you don’t listen to me now you’ll wish you had. I know I sound just like him now, but that’s what I mean.’  
  
Tension took hold of her from the hips outward, till it reached her throat and her little noises stopped. She held on to Hal and let her head fall back, and he kept her upright with a hand to her waist, keeping his thumb flush against her clit as she came. She made the most desperate sound he’d ever heard: she sounded almost like she was crying out in grief. She seemed to undergo a slowing cycle of convulsions, her shudders coming at a distance first of one second, then of three seconds, then of five and seven. Finally they were finished and her only motion came from her breathing.  
  
‘Do you really want to know what it was like,’ Hal asked her. His voice was low; he swept her hair back from her face. He didn’t say what he was asking her about, but thought she must have known.  
  
‘Yes,’ Philippa said.  
  
So Hal pushed her onto her back and used a bit of the lube from his nightstand drawer on her. She was keenly observing, more alert than Hal would have expected, but she seemed remote, somehow both too far inside of her body and too far outside of it. He supposed that was how she was meant to be feeling. He pulled her legs up around her hips and guided his prick into her arsehole again, wondering how it was that he was actually capable of doing this.  
  
‘I’m sorry,’ Hal said, very genuinely. ‘I’m sorry you had to be our father’s daughter.’  
  
He withdrew and rolled her onto her front and got her up onto her hands and knees, and entered her again. He slid his fingers through her hair, then clenched his fist and pulled her head back by it. She made a noise that he thought indicated pleasure. He couldn’t know; the only thing he could do to help himself now was to let himself be reduced to his body, an empty creature animated by sin. He waited for her to say that it hurt, and she didn’t. Selfishly, he felt he wanted to say it: it still hurts, even like this, with you. He came, without quite feeling it, on her lower back, then bent down to lick it off and swallow.  
  
Philippa rolled onto her back and looked at the ceiling. With one leg drawn up, she played with her cunt, letting her fingers slide down to her arsehole; she was taking inventory of her slightly-changed body, coming to know herself again. The red was beginning to fade out of her face, but there was sweat still clinging to her skin, making her shimmer.  
  
‘Do you think he’s going to die?’ she asked.  
  
Lying on his side, half curled-up, Hal said, ’He’s going to die someday.’  
  
‘And do you think he’ll be damned?’  
  
‘I don’t know,’ Hal said. ‘It doesn’t matter. Your soul’s your own.’  
  


* * *

  
For the second time that night, Hal went to the bathroom down the corridor and cleaned himself. He didn’t shower, just washed his hands and wiped down his prick. He had left the door open a crack, and Philippa let herself in and drew herself a bath. While she soaked in the steaming water he opened the little window and smoked a cigarette, which she then demanded a drag of, holding it delicately between her fingertips. She tilted her head back and blew the smoke up into the air. After letting out the bathwater she stood naked at the vanity and undertook her complicated nighttime skincare regimen: she pinned her hair back, and with a variety of droppers and brushes and cotton rounds put liquids from at least five different bottles onto her face and neck, seeming to Hal not to accomplish anything but making her skin look wet. All the same it was nice to watch her.  
  
At one point, bored, Hal came to stand behind her, and looked into the vanity mirror at the reflected image of her looking at her reflection. She looked back at him through the mirror: it was just a glance, and then she turned her attention back to the balm she was rubbing on her lips.  
  
She invited herself not only to sleep in Hal’s bed but to sleep in his clothes, in an old Adidas t-shirt with holes under the arms and tracksuit bottoms that were too small on Hal but too big on her. She curled up on her side, facing away from him but with her back pressed against him, and fell asleep quickly. For hours Hal sat up beside her in the dark, surrounded still by the acrid smell of fucking, and looked at his phone, scrolling through Instagram, going hundreds of pictures deep into his friends’ friends’ public profiles, observing how other people had lived their lives those past few years. He looked at Philippa’s profiles, her public one and her private one, the former elegantly boastful and the latter filled with grainy front-facing camera snaps of half her face, the captions underneath all impenetrable masses of lowercase text that flowed back and forth between oblique gossip and thorough documentation of her tempestuous teenage moods. About a year ago, on her private profile, there was a selfie of her reflection in the window of a Heathrow departure gate, captioned with: ‘but the dawn is breaking its early morn, the taxis waiting hes blowing his horn. already im so lonesome i could die. so kiss me and smile for for me. tell me that youll wait for me hold me like youll never let me go. cos im leaving on a jet plane dont know when ill be back again oh babe i hate to go.’ Hal couldn’t help laughing.  
  
‘What?’ Philippa asked, mostly-asleep.  
  
‘Do you remember that Instagram post you made with “Leaving On A Jet Plane”?’  
  
‘What? I don’t know. I’m asleep.’  
  
‘That selfie at Heathrow? You posted a selfie at the airport with the lyrics to “Leaving On A Jet Plane”? I mean could you not have thought of anything else?’  
  
‘It must have seemed right at the time.’  
  
He asked her whether she had actually known the song or whether she had just searched for “romantic lyrics about air transport,” but she had either fallen asleep again or was ignoring him, and so he let it go. He felt like he had only just got to sleep when Philippa’s phone screen lit up the dark room and her 5:00 alarm rang, repeating a fifteen-second loop of ‘Havana ooh-nah-nah / Half of my heart is in Havana ooh-nah-nah / He took me back to East Atlanta nah-nah-nah / Oh but my heart is in Havana, my heart is in Havana, Havana ooh-nah-nah’. Hal reached over her and hit snooze. She was awake, though, and put her arms around his neck and kissed him until the alarm returned and she had to fumble to turn it off, only she accidentally pressed ‘snooze’ again, so that just when Hal had got his tracksuit bottoms off of her, her phone buzzed from somewhere in the sheets and played: ‘Havana ooh-nah-nah / Half of my heart is in Havana ooh-nah-nah…’  
  
Turning the alarm off properly, Philippa said, ‘Hurry up, though, because I need to go to the studio and at least exercise a bit before I’ve got to go with Tom to see Dad.’  
  
‘Just let Tom go alone,’ Hal said. ‘You don’t have to see him, he’s not going to die if you don’t.’  
  
‘Are you not going to see him today, then?’  
  
‘Well, no, I am going. I’ve got to.’  
  
‘Then I’m going too. Otherwise there’s no reason for me to be here.’  
  
Hal pretended he hadn’t heard what she said. He was settled between her spread legs, eating her cunt, letting her pull his hair. He teased her until she was wet, then made her come as quickly as he could, which all in all took about six minutes. She let herself have a minute to lie there and collect herself; after that she was up and about, slamming doors and stomping, as if she was expanding her presence to fill the almost-empty house. He heard her down the corridor singing as she dressed. The sun was just rising; Hal’s drapes were closed, but the light got in around the sides, and brought the space up from black to blue.  
  
When Philippa left the house, Hal came out with her so far as the front step, his cigarettes and lighter tucked into the pocket of the crumpled trousers he’d picked up off of his bedroom floor. The sky was overcast, the air faintly misty. They were alone on the street, hidden by the still, damp early morning. Lighting up, Hal asked if she wanted a smoke, and she said she was late already, but held the sides of his face and pulled herself up to kiss his mouth.  
  
Philippa lingered in it, her lips open against his, until she remembered herself and pulled away and cried: ‘Bye! Bye-ee! Byy-eee!’ Hal looked the other way as she went off down the street: he never watched anyone he loved out of sight.

* * *

**Author's Note:**

> 'Your soul's your own' is homage to/theft from Lilliburlero's Hal/Francis fic [The base-string of humility](https://archiveofourown.org/works/5654728).


End file.
